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Old 22-10-21, 10:16 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 23rd, ’21

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October 23rd, 2021




Keeping Pirates at Bay

Protecting digital content is a 24/7 challenge
Dan Meier

The summer’s tentpole movie was more than a box office disappointment and lawsuit catalyst for Scarlett Johansson; Marvel’s Black Widow was also the most pirated movie of the pandemic era, as reported by TorrentFreak. One possible culprit (apart from the temptation to see Ray Winstone attempt a Russian accent) is simultaneous digital distribution, the practice of releasing a film on VoD and in theaters at the same time.

Not only is this potentially harming earnings (the complaint behind Johansson’s legal action), it arguably makes the most valuable assets the most vulnerable.

“The opportunity for cyberattacks to occur is elevated as the risk of disruption from these digital releases increases during high-profile events, mainly if a film is available to download and stream at the same time as a cinema release,” says Eric Elbaz, strategic engagement manager—Broadcasting Media, Akamai. “Pirates and threat actors are opportunistic in nature and will take advantage of high-profile releases to maximize their impact and return on investment. Companies must be aware of this trend and take action to mitigate the risks.”

Looking outside the Hollywood bubble, cyberattacks are on the rise the world over; ransomware attacks in particular were up 151% in the first half of 2021 (compared to the same time in 2020), according to data from Atlas VPN. And yet the media industry is under unique pressure to keep its materials under wraps, according to Christopher J. Chan, Partner at international law firm Eversheds Sutherland.

“While ransomware attacks and breaches in customer data privacy have been well publicized in other industries,” Chan said, “the reliance of the media industry on maintaining confidentiality in a motion picture product makes the media industry particularly prone to the adverse effects of a successful cyberattack which may compromise the details of an otherwise motion picture product, such as a plot or storyline, or surprise ending to a movie.”

SHIELDING CONTENT

Without a team of superheroes to protect them, how can media companies defend this content from increasingly sophisticated forms of piracy? The trend towards content protection offers something in the way of security, a combination of authentication, encryption and watermarking to prevent assets from being copied.

“We see greater investment than ever in protecting content, especially as the nature of how content is delivered continues to evolve,” confirms Darren Lepke, head of video product management at Edgecast. “As content availability increases, we’re likely to see content providers apply more pressure on OTT platforms to support advanced solutions like watermarking and proactive monitoring, in addition to standard methods like DRM, encryption, and user authentication.

“We anticipate that watermarking solutions will become crucial, particularly for live sports,” Lepke continued. “Forensic watermarking will enable platforms to identify unauthorized traffic and determine which streams are being compromised so that security professionals can quickly shut them down.”

Even with this increased investment, content protection is a far from perfect solution, as Chain explains: “No content protection technology has yet proven 100% effective against video and streaming piracy, and the sophistication of pirates and infringers appears to increase with each advance of new content protection technology... It is still an open question as to whether content protection technology will ever be strong enough to prevent the unauthorized pirating and distribution of video and streaming content.”

Deploying content protection in tandem with other cybersecurity protocols makes for more robust defences, both prior to and after a product’s release.

“Content protection and cybersecurity need to cooperate with each other to provide effective protection against bad actors as well as convenient and easy access to video and streamed content by authorized consumers,” notes Chan. “During development and production, as well as after the public release of video and streamed content, such content should be sufficiently protected with both content protection measures as well as effective cybersecurity for associated networks and computers. The lapse in sufficient protection of video and streamed content by either content protection or by cybersecurity will likely jeopardize the economic value in the video and streamed content.”

On the network side, regular testing of a system’s defenses adds another layer of protection against piracy. Wayne Pecena, director of engineering at KAMU TV/FM at Texas A&M University, and past president of SBE, advocates “penetration testing,” which seeks to discover and exploit security flaws in an IT system.

“A pen test is executed by an ‘ethical’ hacker or ‘white hack’ hacker,” he explains. “The goal is to proactively find security flaws and correct in lieu of system flaws discovered by an actual cybersecurity event. Pen testing is a key aspect of a security audit.” Employing hacking tools such as NMAP or METASPLOIT, the would-be hacker carries out network reconnaissance, uncovers points of vulnerability and tests default logins.

“I view penetration testing as the ‘proof of performance’ for the broadcast IT environment to verify the cybersecurity prevention measures that you think are in place really work,” says Pecena.

NEW POWERS

Emerging technologies such as AI and 5G will also have a key role to play in cybersecurity operations, and could be particularly powerful tools when combined.

Elbaz uses the following example: “AI can monitor shifts in internet traffic that may signal the start of an attack. 5G technologies can enable the fastest response possible by allowing AI to perform at-the-edge inference analysis and mitigation within milliseconds of detecting an oncoming attack.”

By accelerating the speed of data analysis and enriching the granularity of detection, the efficiency of cybersecurity could be considerably enhanced. But so too could the attacks themselves; just as supervillains come in evil versions of their nemeses’ armor, hackers will harness the same technology used by media companies and the arms race wages on.

In the end these villains are thwarted when the heroes work together in ways that are unavailable to the forces of greed, and Philip James, Partner at Eversheds Sutherland, sees an opportunity for companies to provide something communal that pirates cannot, by using technology creatively.

“There is nothing like the shared experience of the theater,” he argues. “The more unique or distinct a theatrical performance can be, whether via virtual reality, 3D, in-theatre special effects, hospitality, exclusive content, trailers and interviews with directors and actors, the better opportunity there is for content creators to maintain an edge over hackers... by making the official content the best experience it can be.”
https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/ke...pirates-at-bay





ISPs Want More Money Because So Many People Are Streaming Squid Game

Broadband providers claim Squid Game’s popularity means they should get paid more. But that’s not how networks or reality work.
Karl Bode

ISPs around the world claim the unprecedented bandwidth demands Netflix’s Squid Game is placing on their broadband networks means they should be getting more money. But experts say that’s not how telecom networks work, suggesting that already cash-flush telecom giants are just positioning themselves for an underserved hand out.

The popular South Korean thriller, a not so thinly-veiled critique of late-stage capitalism, tracks a group of indebted people who compete in deadly children's games for cash. According to Netflix, Squid Game is the most popular show in company history, the number one program in 94 countries, and has been watched by 142 million households.

ISPs around the world also claim the show’s popularity is driving a massive surge in bandwidth consumption, and they want their cut.

In South Korea, Internet service provider SK Broadband sued Netflix earlier this month, claiming that between May and September the ISP’s network traffic jumped 24 times to 1.2 trillion bits of data processed every second. This surge is Netflix’s fault, the ISP insists, and Netflix should be held financially responsible.

In the UK, British Telecom executives have been making similar complaints, insisting that Netflix should be forced to help pay for the surge in network traffic caused by the show.

But broadband experts say that’s not how broadband networks actually work.

“It makes no sense for ISPs to cry victim because they provide a popular service, and are expected to provide it,” John Bergmayer, telecom expert at consumer group Public Knowledge told Motherboard. “People subscribe to broadband to do things like stream video, and it’s broadband customers who are requesting all these Squid Game streams. They are not somehow imposed on ISPs by Netflix.”

Internet service providers typically design their network capacity to handle prime-time peak consumer demand, regardless of traffic type. Already paid by businesses and consumers alike, the responsibility of meeting this demand falls on the ISP, not Netflix.

Bergmayer said there’s some instances where ISPs might have legitimate complaints about unfair network burdens (like a struggling ISP in a developing nation with limited resources), but it’s generally not a problem for larger ISPs. Netflix does provide settings that help users on capped broadband connections reduce their overall bandwidth consumption, and also provides ISPs free access to its content delivery network (CDN) to help reduce overall network strain.

Dane Jasper, CEO of independent California ISP Sonic, told Motherboard the narrative of streaming’s impact pushed by bigger ISPs—from their justifications for unpopular broadband caps to their claims that Squid Game poses a dire threat—often aren’t based in reality.

“Data caps in general make little sense,” Jasper told Motherboard. “The individual who is downloading all day long isn’t really a problem, they’re using otherwise idle capacity during slack time. It’s only during the peak hour that anyone’s usage matters.”

Jasper also contested the argument that Squid Game has had a meaningful impact on ISP network performance or bottom lines.

“If it increases peak hour viewing could mean more capacity needs to be deployed,” Jasper said. “But is a particular show actually increasing peak hour viewing time? Aren’t people watching it at all hours? And don’t they still work, eat dinner, etcetera? Unless it changes behavior and shifts people away from offline activities, there won’t be much impact.”

Jasper said this dynamic changes for live streaming events during prime time, as a rush of simultaneous users can place a significant burden on broadband networks and CDNs. But traditional streaming doesn’t pose the same capacity challenges for an ISP.

So why are big ISPs making such claims? Money and political strategy, mostly.

Envious of their revenues, telecom giants for years have complained that companies like Google and Netflix get a “free ride” on their networks and should pay an additional toll for no substantive reason. AT&T’s claim that Google “rides its pipes for free” and should pay an additional surcharge helped spark the U.S. net neutrality debate more than fifteen years ago.

Consumer advocates see such efforts as little more than “double dipping” on the part of telecom giants, who are already paid handsomely for services that routinely underwhelm. Net neutrality rules, discarded in the United States after relentless telecom lobbying, were intended to thwart telecom monopolies from abusing their market power in such a fashion.

Most technology giants, be they Google, Facebook, or Netflix, not only pay for bandwidth, they spend billions of dollars on cloud capacity, transit, undersea cables, content delivery networks, and in Google’s case, even their own residential ISP. Consumers also already pay an arm and leg for bandwidth, especially in countries (like the U.S.) where broadband competition is limited.

Nobody gets a “free ride” from the heavily-monopolized telecom industry, but the argument has become a common talking point among telecom executives worldwide all sharing the same goal: offloading network construction and operation costs to somebody else.
So as Netflix’s Squid Game grabbed headlines, larger ISPs saw an opportunity to revisit the dated and misleading argument. In the UK this week, British Telecom not only complained to The Guardian that Netflix was an unfair freeloader harming the company’s network, but that the UK should weaken or eliminate net neutrality consumer protections.

“When the rules were created 25 years ago I don’t think anyone would have envisioned four or five companies would be driving 80% of the traffic on the world’s internet,” BT Chief Executive Marc Allera insisted. “They aren’t making a contribution to the services they are being carried on; that doesn’t feel right.”

The argument, often funneled through industry-allied regulators and think tankers, often varies slightly but the underlying message remains the same: companies like Netflix are nasty freeloaders, and must pay telecom giants additional money for no coherent reason. While U.S. ISPs haven’t leveraged Squid Game’s popularity in this fight yet, there’s still time.

“US ISPs have made identical complaints before, so I don’t see what would stop them from doing it again,” Bergmayer said. “This is why I want net neutrality rules, not net neutrality ‘pledges’ from ISPs.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxde...ing-squid-game





Governor Unveils $1B West Virginia Broadband Expansion Plan
John Raby

West Virginia is ready to move forward with a plan to expand long-sought broadband access in rural communities at a potential cost of more than $1 billion, Gov. Jim Justice announced Friday.

The plan, which Justice called the largest investment in broadband in the state’s history, will combine federal and state funding with private-sector investments and aims to bring broadband availability to at least 200,000 additional homes and businesses.

“We’re going to change the trajectory of West Virginia in a bigger and better way,” Justice said at a event announcing the program.

The plan will combine the state’s $236 million commitment to $362 million in funding from the Federal Communication Commission and $120 million from other state and federal resources, the governor’s office said in a news release. Most of the state funding comes from its share of federal American Rescue Plan allocations.

The statement said the money will be allocated through competitive programs that draw additional matching funds from private sector and local government partners.

“We’re talking of something not just that is going to be life changing,” U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin said. “This is generational changing.”

State Economic Development Director Mitch Carmichael said the plan will boost the ability for rural areas to offer distance learning, remote work and telehealth options.

Los Angeles-based data company BroadbandNow ranks West Virginia as the worst state for broadband coverage. The governor’s statement, citing FCC data, said at least 30% of the state’s rural homes and business lack adequate broadband access.

Funding will be allocated to specific locations after the state spent two years mapping broadband access and produced a list of underserved areas, the statement said.

About $10 million in state general revenue funds will be used to expand and improve existing wireless internet networks.
https://apnews.com/article/technolog...f309e5653842bf





Arizona Laying Conduit Along Highways to Connect Rural Areas
AP

Arizona is launching a project to use interstate highways in the state to help provide broadband internet access to rural areas.

The state Department of Transportation this week began laying fiber-optic conduit along southbound Interstate 17 in northern Arizona as part of a project with the Arizona Commerce Authority to provide more rural communities with affordable access to high-speed internet service.

ADOT said there will be right-lane restrictions as crews lay the conduit in 3-mile (4,8-kilometer) sections between milepost 340 in Flagstaff and milepost 296 just south of the junction with State Route 179 to Sedona.

Legislation sponsored by Rep. Regina Cobb, a Republican, to authorize the project was approved by the Legislature last spring and signed into law by Gov. Doug Ducey.

According to ADOT, the installation of the fiber-optic conduit along rights-of-way of interstate highways also will be used for technology such as overhead message boards, traffic cameras, weather stations and wrong-way driving detection equipment.

“ The infrastructure also will help lay the groundwork for emerging technology like connected and automated vehicles,” ADOT said in a statement.

The department said there is already a fiber-optic conduit along freeways in the Phoenix and Tucson areas, as well as a stretch of Interstate 10 near Eloy for the dust detection and warning system.
https://apnews.com/article/technolog...68604563bf3a69





Internet Service Providers Collect, Sell Horrifying Amount of Sensitive Data, Government Study Concludes

“Even though several of the ISPs promise not to sell consumers personal data, they allow it to be used, transferred, and monetized by others."
Karl Bode

Over the last few years the justified fixation on the bad behavior of Google, Amazon, Facebook and other Silicon Valley giants has let the abuses of the telecom sector fly under the radar. But a new FTC report showcases how when it comes to consumer privacy, broadband providers are every bit as terrible as you thought they were.

The new FTC report studied the privacy practices of six unnamed broadband ISPs and their advertising arms, and found that the companies routinely collect an ocean of consumer location, browsing, and behavioral data. They then share this data with dodgy middlemen via elaborate business arrangements that often aren’t adequately disclosed to broadband consumers.

“Even though several of the ISPs promise not to sell consumers personal data, they allow it to be used, transferred, and monetized by others and hide disclosures about such practices in fine print of their privacy policies,” the FTC report said.

The FTC also found that while many ISPs provide consumers tools allowing them to opt out of granular data collection, those tools are cumbersome to use—when they work at all.

“Many of the ISPs also claim to offer consumers choices about how their data is used and allow them to access such data,” the FTC said. “The FTC found, however, that many of these companies often make it difficult for consumers to exercise such choices and sometimes even nudge them to share even more information.”

ISPs often provide privacy-specific website portals proclaiming to provide users with a wide variety of opt out options but these choices are often “illusory,” the FTC found.

The agency’s report also found that while ISPs promise to only keep consumer data for as long as needed for “business purposes,” the definition of what constitutes a “business purpose” is extremely broad and varies among broadband providers and wireless carriers.

The report repeatedly cites Motherboard reporting showing how wireless companies have historically sold sensitive consumer location data to dubious third parties, often without user consent. This data has subsequently been abused from everyone from bounty hunters and stalkers to law enforcement and those posing as law enforcement.

The FTC was quick to note that because ISPs have access to the entirety of the data that flows across the internet and your home network, they often have access to even more data than what’s typically collected by large technology companies, ad networks, and app makers.

That includes the behavior of internet of things devices connected to your network, your daily movements, your online browsing history, clickstream data (not only which sites you visit but how much time you linger there), email and search data, race and ethnicity data, DNS records, your cable TV viewing habits, and more.

In some instances ISPs have even developed tracking systems that embed each packet a user sends over the internet with an individual identifier, allowing monitoring of user behavior in granular detail. Wireless carrier Verizon was fined $1.3 million in 2016 for implementing such a system without informing consumers or letting them opt out.

“Unlike traditional ad networks whose tracking consumers can block through browser or mobile device settings, consumers cannot use these tools to stop tracking by these ISPs, which use ‘supercookie’ technology to persistently track users,” the FTC report said.

The FTC found that much of the data collected isn’t necessary for the everyday business purposes of ISPs. The collection and storage of such massive troves of unnecessary data harms consumers via potential exploitation by “property managers, bail bondsmen, bounty hunters, or those who would use it for discriminatory purposes,” the FTC said.

Most of the FTC’s revelations have been documented for years, but actual attempts to rein in the behavior have proven hard to come by. The United States still doesn’t have a privacy law for the internet era, in large part thanks to a cross-industry coalition of lobbying opposition.

Efforts to rein in broadband privacy abuses specifically are also often quickly dismantled by telecom industry lobbyists. In 2017 the FCC attempted to pass broadband specific privacy rules requiring transparency in what data is collected and sold, but a heavily-lobbied Congress dismantled the agency’s rules before they could even take effect.

Complaints from consumer groups on wireless, fixed-line broadband, or cable set top box privacy abuses are routinely not followed up on by U.S. regulators. While the FTC voted 4-0 to approve and issue its latest report on telecom privacy practices, actually doing something to rein in the industry’s bad behavior will prove to be another issue entirely.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/93b9...tudy-concludes





Hacker Steals Government ID Database for Argentina’s Entire Population
Catalin Cimpanu

A hacker has breached the Argentinian government’s IT network and stolen ID card details for the country’s entire population, data that is now being sold in private circles.

The hack, which took place last month, targeted RENAPER, which stands for Registro Nacional de las Personas, translated as National Registry of Persons.

The agency is a crucial cog inside the Argentinian Interior Ministry, where it is tasked with issuing national ID cards to all citizens, data that it also stores in digital format as a database accessible to other government agencies, acting as a backbone for most government queries for citizen’s personal information.

Lionel Messi and Sergio Aguero data leaked on Twitter

The first evidence that someone breached RENAPER surfaced earlier this month on Twitter when a newly registered account named @AnibalLeaks published ID card photos and personal details for 44 Argentinian celebrities.

This included details for the country’s president Alberto Fernández, multiple journalists and political figures, and even data for soccer superstars Lionel Messi and Sergio Aguero.

A day after the images and personal details were published on Twitter, the hacker also posted an ad on a well-known hacking forum, offering to look up the personal details of any Argentinian user.

Faced with a media fallback following the Twitter leaks, the Argentinian government confirmed a security breach three days later.

In an October 13 press release, the Ministry of Interior said its security team discovered that a VPN account assigned to the Ministry of Health was used to query the RENAPER database for 19 photos “in the exact moment in which they were published on the social network Twitter.”

Officials added that “the [RENAPER] database did not suffer any data breach or leak,” and authorities are now currently investigating eight government employees about having a possible role in the leak.

Hacker has a copy of the data, plans to sell and leak it

However, The Record contacted the individual who was renting access to the RENAPER database on hacking forums.

In a conversation earlier today, the hacker said they have a copy of the RENAPER data, contradicting the government’s official statement.

The individual proved their statement by providing the personal details, including the highly sensitive Trámite number, of an Argentinian citizen of our choosing.

“Maybe in a few days I’m going to publish [the data of] 1 million or 2 millon people,” the RENAPER hacker told The Record earlier today. They also said they plan to continue selling access to this data to all interested buyers.

When The Record shared a link to the government’s press release in which officials blamed the intrusion on a possibly compromised VPN account, the hacker simply replied “careless employees yes,” indirectly confirming the point of entry.

According to a sample provided by the hacker online, the information they have access to right now includes full names, home addresses, birth dates, gender info, ID card issuance and expiration dates, labor identification codes, Trámite numbers, citizen numbers, and government photo IDs.

Argentina currently has an estimated population of more than 45 million, although it’s unclear how many entries are in the database. The hacker claimed to have it all.

This is the second major security breach in the country’s history after the Gorra Leaks in 2017 and 2019 when hacktivists leaked the personal details of Argentinian politicians and police forces.
https://therecord.media/hacker-steal...re-population/





Vinyl Is Selling So Well That It’s Getting Hard to Sell Vinyl

Left for dead in the 1980s, vinyl records are now the music industry’s most popular and highest-grossing physical format. Getting them manufactured, however, is increasingly a challenge.
Ben Sisario

Within the Indianapolis office of Joyful Noise Recordings, a specialty label that caters to vinyl-loving fans of underground rock, is a corner that employees call the “lathe cave.”

There sits a Presto 6N record lathe — a 1940s-vintage machine the size of a microwave that makes records by cutting a groove into a blank vinyl platter. Unlike most standard records, which are pressed by the hundreds or thousands, each lathe-cut disc must be created individually.

“It’s incredibly laborious,” said Karl Hofstetter, the label’s founder. “If a song is three minutes long, it takes three minutes to make every one.”

This ancient technology — scuffed and dinged, the lathe looks like something from a World War II submarine — is a key part of Joyful Noise’s strategy to survive the very surge of vinyl popularity the label has helped fuel. Left for dead with the advent of CDs in the 1980s, vinyl records are now the music industry’s most popular and highest-grossing physical format, with fans choosing it for collectibility, sound quality or simply the tactile experience of music in an age of digital ephemerality. After growing steadily for more than a decade, LP sales exploded during the pandemic.

In the first six months of this year, 17 million vinyl records were sold in the United States, generating $467 million in retail revenue, nearly double the amount from the same period in 2020, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Sixteen million CDs were also sold in the first half of 2021, worth just $205 million. Physical recordings are now just a sliver of the overall music business — streaming is 84 percent of domestic revenue — but they can be a strong indication of fan loyalty, and stars like Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo make vinyl an important part of their marketing.

Yet there are worrying signs that the vinyl bonanza has exceeded the industrial capacity needed to sustain it. Production logjams and a reliance on balky, decades-old pressing machines have led to what executives say are unprecedented delays. A couple of years ago, a new record could be turned around in a few months; now it can take up to a year, wreaking havoc on artists’ release plans.

Kevin Morby, a singer-songwriter from Kansas City, Kan., said that his latest LP, “A Night at the Little Los Angeles,” barely arrived in time to sell on his fall tour. And he is one of the lucky ones. Artists from the Beach Boys to Tyler, the Creator have seen their vinyl held up recently.

“It’s almost how I feel about playing live music,” Morby said in an interview. “I now count every show as a success. ‘Wow, we pulled it off — no one got Covid.’ Now I know what it’s like for the world to completely stop. So even if it’s going to be a little late I’m still grateful for that.”

For Joyful Noise, the vinyl crunch has also presented a puzzling problem. Up to 500 V.I.P. customers pay the label $200 a year for special editions of every LP it makes. But the production holdups mean the label cannot predict which titles will be ready during 2022.

“How do we in good conscience sell this for next year,” Hofstetter said, “if we don’t know when these records will show up?”

The label’s solution is to make lathe-cut singles for each of the eight albums it intends to release next year, as placeholder bonuses while its customers wait. Doing so will cost Joyful Noise money and time — Hofstetter groaned as we calculated that eight records with five minutes of music per side, cut 500 times each, would take 666 hours of lathe work — but the label sees it as a necessary investment.

Others are just as frustrated. Thrill Jockey, a Chicago label for indie-rock connoisseurs, wants to celebrate its 30th anniversary next year with a series of reissues, but its founder, Bettina Richards, said she has no idea which titles can be made in time. John Brien of Important Records, which releases work by contemporary composers, recently declared online that “vinyl is dead,” but clarified in an interview that the format is too essential to abandon.

Not even the biggest stars are immune. In an interview this month with BBC Radio, Adele, whose album “30” is due Nov. 19 — and is sure to be a blockbuster on LP — said her release date had been set six months ago to get vinyl and CDs made in time.

“There was like a 25-week lead time!” she exclaimed. “So many CD factories and vinyl factories, they bloody closed down even before Covid because no one bloody prints them anymore.”

Music and manufacturing experts cite a variety of factors behind the holdup. The pandemic shut down many plants for a time, and problems in the global supply chain have slowed the movement of everything from cardboard and polyvinyl chloride — the “vinyl” that records (and plumbing pipes) are made from — to finished albums. In early 2020, a fire destroyed one of only two plants in the world that made lacquer discs, an essential part of the record-making process.

But the bigger issue may be simple supply and demand. Consumption of vinyl LPs has grown much faster than the industry’s ability to make records. The business relies on an aging infrastructure of pressing machines, most of which date to the 1970s or earlier and can be costly to maintain. New machines came along only in recent years, and can cost up to $300,000 each. There’s a backlog of orders for those, too.

Exotic problems pop up that would never interfere with a release on YouTube or SoundCloud. “We had a raccoon infestation,” said Caren Kelleher of Gold Rush Vinyl, a boutique plant in Austin, Texas. “That set us back a week.”

The limits of this infrastructure are being tested as major artists — and super-retailers like Walmart and Amazon — increasingly push vinyl. It is not hard to see why: At a time when CD sales are vanishing and streaming has left artists complaining about minuscule payouts, a new LP, especially if offered in eye-catching colors or in collector-baiting design variants, can sell for $25 or more. As some see it, releases by top pop acts are gumming up the production chain, crowding out the smaller artists and labels that have remained loyal to the format all along.

“What worries me more than anything is that the major labels will dominate and take over all of the capacity, which I don’t think is a good idea,” said Rick Hashimoto of Record Technology Inc., a midsize plant in Camarillo, Calif., that works with many indie labels.

Others say the big labels are just a convenient target. The real problem, they believe, isn’t celebrities jumping on the vinyl bandwagon but that the industrial network simply has not expanded quickly enough to meet growing demand.

“Am I mad that Olivia Rodrigo sold 76,000 vinyl copies of her album?” said Ben Blackwell of Third Man, the record label and vinyl empire that counts Jack White of the White Stripes as one of its founders. “Not at all! This is what I would have dreamed of when we started Third Man — that the biggest frontline artists are all pushing vinyl, and that young kids are into it.

“If someone is mad that that prevents some other title from being pressed,” Blackwell continued, “it feels a little bit elitist and gatekeep-y.”

Still, there are worries that the renaissance may be at risk if further delays frustrate consumers and artists — or if vinyl comes to be treated as just another merchandise item, like T-shirts or key chains, from which fickle fans will simply move on.

Among old-school record types, there have long been suspicions that many new fans buy vinyl for a collectible thrill but never actually drop a needle.

“We noticed during Covid that we got a lot more mail-order complaints like, ‘The jacket has a 10th-of-an-inch bend on the corner,’” said Brian Lowit of Dischord Records, the Washington label behind post-punk icons like Fugazi. “We ask them if the record is playing well and they’ll say, ‘I don’t know, I just keep it in the shrink wrap.’”

For artists, especially ones without major-label backing, sticking with vinyl has now become a question about whether it is worth the trouble.

“Right now vinyl feels legitimizing,” said Cassandra Jenkins, a singer-songwriter in Brooklyn whose last album, “An Overview on Phenomenal Nature,” was a surprise vinyl hit — it started with a pressing of 300 copies and eventually went to 7,000.

“It’s an investment for an artist,” she added. “I want these objects that I can sell, so I am going to invest in that.”

For some musicians like Jenkins, that investment has now begun to affect the creative process. After the release of her last album, in February, she began working on follow-up material. But the long turnaround time for vinyl meant she had to get started immediately, with a tight deadline, to get her music in the manufacturing pipeline.

In Jenkins’s case, the pressure had a positive effect. She recorded an EP of new material, due by the end of the year on vinyl only. Another release, “(An Overview on) An Overview on Phenomenal Nature,” with outtakes and a new track, will come out on CD and digital formats next month — with vinyl to follow in April.

“It oddly pushed me into making more music than I would have had we the more luxurious deadlines of yore,” Jenkins said.

And her next project?

“This year, it was really important to me to have vinyl,” she said. “Maybe next year it won’t be.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/a...ds-delays.html





Man Arrested for Uncensoring Japanese Porn With AI in First Deepfake Case

Deepfake technology could practically reverse the pixelation in Japanese adult videos, raising legal and ethical questions.
Hanako Montgomery

Japanese police on Monday arrested a 43-year-old man for using artificial intelligence to effectively unblur pixelated porn videos, in the first criminal case in the country involving the exploitative use of the powerful technology.

Masayuki Nakamoto, who runs his own website in the southern prefecture of Hyogo, lifted images of porn stars from Japanese adult videos and doctored them with the same method used to create realistic face swaps in deepfake videos.

But instead of changing faces, Nakamoto used machine learning software to reconstruct the blurred parts of the video based on a large set of uncensored nudes and sold the content online. Penises and vaginas are pixelated in Japanese porn because an obscenity law forbids the explicit depictions of genitalia.

Nakamoto reportedly made about 11 million yen ($96,000) by selling over 10,000 manipulated videos, though he was arrested specifically for selling 10 fake photos at about 2,300 yen ($20) each.

Nakamoto pleaded guilty to charges of copyright violation and displaying obscene images and said he did it for money, according to NHK. He was caught when police conducted a “cyber patrol,” the Japanese broadcaster reported.

Photo-realistic images created using AI are increasingly common and have raised many legal and ethical questions concerning privacy, sexual exploitation, copyright, and artistic expression.

“This is the first case in Japan where police have caught an AI user,” Daisuke Sueyoshi, a lawyer who’s tried cybercrime cases, told VICE World News. “At the moment, there’s no law criminalizing the use of AI to make such images.”

For example, Nakamoto was not charged with any offenses for violating the privacy of the actors in the videos.

Globally, victims of doctored videos, often women, and governments are grappling with a proliferation of deepfakes. In Taiwan, a man was arrested also on Monday for selling deepfake porn on a Telegram group with some 6,000 members. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen called the crime “online sex violence” and said she would consider legislation against it.

“These victims could be people you and I care about. They could be our families and friends. We can’t sit on the sidelines,” Tsai said in a Facebook post.

Tsai also linked the use of the technology to the threat posed by fake videos and fake information to democracy.

The potential of using deepfakes to sow mistrust and manipulate public opinion was demonstrated as early as 2018, when a viral video showed former U.S. President Barack Obama calling his successor Donald Trump a “total and complete dipshit.”

The next year, California banned political deepfakes within 60 days of an election to combat potential campaign misinformation.

So far, as in Nakamoto’s case, deepfake technology has been used overwhelmingly to simulate pornographic videos.

According to Sensity, a startup that offers fake video detection services, 96 percent of deepfake videos depicted nonconsensual pornography in 2019. In fact, the Reddit users credited with propelling deepfakes into the mainstream used this technology to swap female celebrities’ faces into porn videos. Such use has led to numerous cases of victims fighting to remove compromising fake videos from the internet.

In India, a gang allegedly blackmailed people by threatening to send deepfake videos of them to their families.

Sueyoshi said criminalizing the use of deepfake software or similar technology is not the right answer to the problem, as the tools themselves could be used for legitimate purposes.

“Using AI to lift mosaics isn’t what’s wrong. It’s how the suspect Nakamoto used AI,” he said.

But given cases of copyright infringement or exploitation of a person’s privacy, Sueyoshi said it was necessary to introduce laws that restrict how, not whether, deepfake technology is used.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgdq...-japanese-porn





Best VPN for Torrenting 2021

We take a look at the issues involved with torrenting and P2P file sharing, along with four VPN services that can provide support for legitimate P2P users.
David Gewirtz

BitTorrent is a complex topic. As a technology, it's perfectly legal. But what you do with it could be illegal.

Before we dive into the legalities of torrenting, let's do a quick recap of what BitTorrent is and how it works. Fundamentally, BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing network and protocol. But what does that mean? Well, normally when you download a file, you're pulling all the bits from one server. If that server has limited bandwidth, the number of people downloading might be quite limited.

BitTorrent splits that up. Files on the BitTorrent network are scattered in pieces among "seeders" (computers that host the full file) and downloaders, so when someone downloads a file, they're pulling pieces of that file from many different machines. That's the peer-to-peer component of torrenting. You're not just pulling from one central server; you're pulling from other users (peers) on the torrent network.

Why would you do this? For smaller files, torrenting is not important. But for really big files, torrenting helps distribute the load among users. And what are big files? Video. A two-hour HD movie uses up to about 8GB. A TV series could use upwards of 80GB per season of the show. Other big files are software distributions, like Linux distros, games, large images, and big datasets.

The problem is that most often, BitTorrent is used to share video. And most often, BitTorrent is used to share copyrighted video like popular movies and TV shows. And the problem with that is that doing so is illegal in most jurisdictions. And that is how we come back to VPNs, because while VPNs can protect your usage and location for legitimate reasons, VPNs can also facilitate illegal activity.

This has not gone unnoticed by movie studios and other victims of digital piracy. In May, a case assigned to U.S. District Judge S. Kato Crews, 1:21-cv-01261, Millennium Funding, Inc. et al v. Sharktech, Inc. et al was filed against an Internet hosting provider that operated servers for a number of VPN firms. According to TorrentFreak, the parties settled for an undisclosed sum just this month.

Another case, Case 1:21-cv-00643-RDA-MSN, filed in Virginia pits various movie studios against VPN companies ExpressVPN, Surfshark, VPN Unlimited (another name for the owners of ExpressVPN, according to the complaint), and Zenmate. This complaint not only targets illegal downloading of content, but also specifically cites examples of VPNs used to facilitate trade in child pornography including United States of America v. Frank Richard Beyer, 0:19-cr-60360-RAR, where Beyer admitted to using ExpressVPN for his heinous and disgusting acts.

We had an internal debate about the ethics of even writing an article about using VPNs for torrenting. But as I said at the beginning of this article, it's not the technology itself that's illegal. The illegality is in how some users use it.

And so, we're providing you with a list of four of the more popular VPN services that can be used for torrenting. We explicitly do not endorse the use of torrenting, but because BitTorrent is as valid for sharing legitimate software and video distribution from open source and copyright-free providers, we feel that sharing this is a necessary part of our coverage, especially now that you understand some of the issues involved.

And with that, here are four such services.

NordVPN

• P2P Servers: Yes
• Simultaneous Connections: 6
• Kill Switch: Yes
• Platforms: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, Android TV, Chrome, Firefox
• Logging: None, except billing data
• Countries: 59
• Servers: 5517
• Trial/MBG: 30 day

NordVPN is one of the most popular consumer VPNs out there. Last year, Nord announced that it had been breached. Unfortunately, the breach had been active for more than 18 months. While there were failures at every level, NordVPN has taken substantial efforts to remedy the breach.

In our review, we liked that it offered capabilities beyond basic VPN, including support of P2P sharing, a service it calls Double VPN that does a second layer of encryption, Onion over VPN which allows for TOR capabilities over its VPN, and even a dedicated IP if you're trying to run a VPN that also doubles as a server. It supports all the usual platforms and a bunch of home network platforms as well. The company also offers NordVPN Teams, which provides centralized management and billing for a mobile workforce.

Performance testing was adequate, although ping speeds were slow enough that I wouldn't want to play a twitch video game over the VPN. To be fair, most VPNs have pretty terrible ping speeds, so this isn't a weakness unique to Nord. Overall, a solid choice, and with a 30-day money-back guarantee, worth a try.

IPVanish

• P2P Servers: No
• Simultaneous Connections: Unlimited
• Kill Switch: Yes
• Platforms: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, Chrome, plus routers, Fire Stick, and Kodi
• Logging: None, except billing data
• Servers: 1,500
• Locations: 75
• Trial/MBG: 30 day

IPVanish is a deep and highly configurable product that presents itself as a click-and-go solution. I think the company is selling itself short by doing this. A quick visit to its website shows a relatively generic VPN service, but that's not the whole truth.

Its UI provides a wide range of server selection options, including some great performance graphics. It also has a wide variety of protocols, so no matter what you're connecting to, you can know what to expect. The company also provides an excellent server list with good current status information. There's also a raft of configuration options for the app itself.

In terms of performance, connection speed was crazy fast. Overall transfer performance was good. However, from a security perspective, it wasn't able to hide that I was connecting via a VPN -- although the data transferred was secure. Overall, a solid product with a good user experience that's fine for home connections as long as you're not trying to hide the fact that you're on a VPN.

The company also has a partnership with SugarSync and provides 250GB of encrypted cloud storage with each plan.

ExpressVPN

• P2P Servers: No
• Simultaneous Connections: 5 or unlimited with the router app
• Kill Switch: Yes
• Platforms: A whole lot (see the full list here)
• Logging: No browsing logs, some connection logs
• Countries: 94
• Locations: 160
• Trial/MBG: 30 days

ExpressVPN has been burning up the headlines with some pretty rough news. We've chosen to leave ExpressVPN in this recommendation, and I wouldn't necessarily dismiss ExpressVPN out of hand because of these reports, but it's up to you to gauge your risk level. The best way to do that is read our in-depth analysis:

ExpressVPN is one of the most popular VPN providers out there, offering a wide range of platforms and protocols. Platforms include Windows, Mac, Linux, routers, iOS, Android, Chromebook, Kindle Fire, and even the Nook device. There are also browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Plus, ExpressVPN works with PlayStation, Apple TV, Xbox, Amazon Fire TV, and the Nintendo Switch. There's even a manual setup option for Chromecast, Roku, and Nvidia Switch.

With 160 server locations in 94 countries, ExpressVPN has a considerable VPN network across the internet. In CNET's review of the service, staff writer Rae Hodge reported that ExpressVPN lost less than 2% of performance with the VPN enabled and using the OpenVPN protocol vs. a direct connection.

While the company does not log browsing history or traffic destinations, it does log dates connected to the VPN service, amount transferred, and VPN server location. We do want to give ExpressVPN kudos for making this information very clear and easily accessible.

Surfshark

• P2P Servers: No
• Simultaneous Connections: Unlimited
• Kill Switch: Yes
• Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, Fire TV, Firefox, Chrome
• Logging: None, except billing data
• Trial/MBG: 30 day

At two bucks a month for a two-year plan (billed in one chunk), Surfshark offers a good price for a solid offering. In CNET's testing, no leaks were found (and given that much bigger names leaked connection information, that's a big win). The company seems to have a very strong security focus, offering AES-256-GCM, RSA-2048, and Perfect Forward Secrecy encryption. To prevent WebRTC leaks, Surfshark offers a special purpose browser plugin designed specifically to combat those leaks.

Surfshark's performance was higher than NordVPN and Norton Secure VPN, but lower than ExpressVPN and IPVanish. That said, Surfshark also offers a multihop option that allows you to route connections through two VPN servers across the Surfshark private network. We also like that the company offers some inexpensive add-on features, including ad-blocking, anti-tracking, access to a non-logging search engine, and a tool that tracks your email address against data breach lists.

Am I committing a crime using BitTorrent?

In most countries, it's not a crime to use the technology or the software. But if you're trafficking in the distribution of illegal content or you're distributing content illegally, it can be a crime.

How do I know what's safe to download?

While there's no universal answer, here's a quick guide. Is it child porn? Disgusting, illegal, and we hope the authorities find you and lock you up. Is it a commercially available TV show? Piracy and probably illegal. Is it a recent mainstream movie? Piracy and probably illegal. Is it a Linux distribution? Probably legal. Is it a movie or video from a known legitimate distributor of content, like the Internet Archive? Probably legal.

If VPNs don't keep records of my use, how can I get caught?

First, keep in mind that law enforcement and major movie studios are devoting a lot more resources to penetrating the VPN veil than you or VPN services can to block penetration. The Virginia case, cited above, is an interesting read about how lawyers are not only penetrating secrecy, but also blasting away at the marketing hype of jurisdictional safety. Don't use VPNs for something heinous or illegal and you'll be safe. And yes, I know we've talked about using VPNs for legitimate personal protection reasons, but I just did an entire discussion about how VPN service providers might not provide enough protection. Read that next.

















Until next week,

- js.



















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